As a nation state, Italy has emerged only in 1871. Until then the country was politically divided into a large number of independant cities, provinces and islands. The currently available evidences point out to a dominant Etruscan, Greek and Roman cultural influence on today's Italians.

I know that my female ancestors in Italy kept their surname all of their lives as was the custom. My question is: Do women in Italy today keep their surnames? Or has this custom changed? And what other European countries have this custom? Thanks in advance for any help.

I am sure there are other people more qualified to answer this, but from my reading, women in Italy today usually use their maiden names professionally and their married names in social settings. They do not hyphenate, like some of us tend to do.

In Italy the women have always the birth surname, and the husband surname is used only in social settings, as Poipou said... a name for a woman is always the same for all life, as for the men... regards, suanj

I chose to hyphenate my name when I got married which proved a nightmare! My last name is so long and almost every document, credit card, letter, etc is misspelled. I totally understand about confusion... I should have kept one or the other..not both. I have been regretting it ever since (by the way..I do prefer my maiden name, but only because I have always liked it).

DonnaPellegrin wrote:Nuccia,What is typical of Canadian women? I once worked with a French Canadian woman who kept her maiden name. Is that common up there?

After researching French Canadian Parish registers back into the early 1600's a woman retained her maiden name on all church records. While the records of Ontario are considerably later, a Catholic Church record (regardless of ethnic origin) from that province always lists women by their maiden names first, then denote the spouse. This was also true in France when I started tracing even farther back. It is also (naturally) the custom in Portugal.

In Canada today, on a civil level, women are listed by their married name, regardless of Province.

My name is hyphenated with my mothers surname and fathers...then I got married.....so I have three surnames..... Talk about confusing people...
if they ever try to find me in a genealogy quest a hundred years from now,
I will give them one heck of a brickwall to get over!!!!
wldspirit

This thread made me so happy to hear I wasn't the only one. My maiden name was two words, for a total of 17 letters, which we hyphenated so that Americans wouldn't drop the first word in the Spanish style. I couldn't face adding another hyphenated name (can you imagine the nightmare) when I married so I dropped my maiden name.

I'll be resuming the name without the hyphen when we retire to Italy next year.

If I were an Italian woman, my name would be Patricia Rubino in Sandler (my husband's name). Italian women continue to use their birth names, but they are addressed formally by their husband's name. I would be La Signora Sandler, but all my financial records, health records would indicate my birth name. I wish it were so here, because it would have been much easier to produce correct documents for dual citizenship.